


Kaleidoscope

by derevko (sunshine_queen)



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, Memory Alteration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:04:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3151646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshine_queen/pseuds/derevko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i><b>Myka Bering</b> has had <b>Helena G. Wells</b> erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kaleidoscope

**Author's Note:**

> This story was started for AU Week in October of... 2013, so obviously I missed that window but better late than never! For my first foray into writing for W13, I was lucky enough to have [Karo](velmster.tumblr.com) as a constant cheerleader, and then [Typey](typeytypeytypey.tumblr.com) as a beta extraordinaire. Thank you both so much!
> 
> Lacuna, Inc., the text on the cards, some of the terms/one line of dialogue, and the idea of erasing someone you once loved is from the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Pete had the card in his bedside drawer, next to his dad’s fireman shield, on top of the letter he’d gotten the same day.

 _Mr Lattimer,_ was printed at the upper left of the card, followed by, _**Myka Bering** has had **Helena G. Wells** erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again._

He looked at it every so often and remembered how stunned he had felt when he read it for the first time, his fingertips numb over the cardstock, seeing a stack of identical cards addressed to Artie and Leena and Claudia. Relationship, he sighed, as if that were the word to describe whatever had been between them, and underneath the cards was a letter also addressed to him, his name in Myka’s perfect penmanship.

 _I’m not as strong as you think I am_ , it ended, _but I will be_.

And she had come back later that evening, composed and cool with no memory of Egypt or Yellowstone. “I just needed some time to decompress,” she said vaguely over dinner, her fork poised over her salad. When asked about her furlough, Myka spoke of the museums she had seen in Minneapolis, the crisp evening strolls, the mornings to sleep in -- and when no one commented on that tidbit, Myka looked around the table like they were strangers. “Nothing? No… jokes on how sleeping in for me is seven ten?”

In their haste to appear normal, Claudia and Pete had both jumped in to tease, but Myka looked distant for the rest of the meal and asked to be excused before dessert.

“Are you mad at me?” Myka asked in Pete’s room later that night. He had paused his video game when Myka had knocked, and she was leaning against the side of his bed like she wanted to join him but couldn’t. “I know I should have requested leave, but I needed to go.”

She remembered that much, at least.

\--

Because Myka no longer remembered Helena at all, inventory became a game of keeping Myka away from the H.G. Wells aisle without Myka noticing anything was amiss, which was exhausting. All their careful planning and rearranging came for naught when, during an emergency in Rouen 24-X with Cecilia H. Payne’s pen, Myka had to cut through the H.G. Wells aisle to get there in time to keep the Warehouse from suffering from an overabundance of hydrogen.

“Who is H.G. Wells?” she asked Pete accusingly after the dust had settled.

“Who is what now?” He said dumbly, stalling for time. Had he said something? Was it possible to slip up with something so monumentally important?

“H.G. Wells. I ran through an aisle with boxes all marked H.G. Wells and I don’t know who that is.”

“Well, I hate to break it to you, Mykes, but there’s a limit even to how much your brain can hold,” he said, forcibly not focusing on what, exactly, he was saying, “There are people who have lived that even you do not know about.”

“Yes, but then I came up here and looked him up.”

Pete let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding as Myka continued.

“He was a Victorian writer of science fiction, and he wrote several well-known classics.”

“Good for him?”

Myka shook her head. “No. He wrote _classics_. He wrote _novels_.”

Pete wished he could be anywhere else right now. “Uh huh…”

“I grew up in a bookstore, Pete! How do I have _no knowledge_ of a famous author of several classics? There’s no way.”

“I don’t know, Myka, maybe you’re a bigger book snob than you realized.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, for a moment Pete had the hope that Myka would spin into being angry at him, rather than teetering so dangerously close to this particular precipice. “I think I’ve been hit by an artifact.”

“An artifact?” He repeated, still stalling. Maybe there would be another emergency. Maybe they hadn’t really solved this problem after all, and the Warehouse would explode.

“An artifact that’s making me forget things like this. People! Historic figures of note. People I should know.”

“Sure you’re not just coming up with an excuse for the gaping hole in your knowledge?” He hit the mark, and Myka hit his shoulder in response.

“I’m serious!”

“Oh, I know. Do you smell fudge when there isn’t any fudge?”

“Pete!”

Myka looked borderline distressed, and Pete hated H.G. even more.

“Tell you what. Howsabout you start searching the database, and I’ll track down Claudia and then _she_ can Warehouse-google while you hit the books.”

“I’m not overreacting,” Myka said as a way of accepting his terms, sitting down in front of a computer.

“I know you’re not,” Pete replied honestly, “And if you were whammied we’ll figure it out.”

Pete was pretty sure that with Leena’s sensitivity and Claudia’s brains and his own knowledge of Myka, they could create some kind of semi-plausible explanation. The trick would be getting Myka to believe it.

\--

Myka and Emily were in the kitchen making tea and, as Claudia put it, ‘necking.’

“Necking?” Pete asked, making a face. “That’s what you’re going with, seriously?”

Claudia made a face of her own. “I can’t say they’re making out, it’s too weird.”

And it was too weird, but this whole situation was too weird, and a peal of laughter bounced out of the kitchen, bright and shining and Myka’s. “She’s… happy. And we have to, you know. Make the best of it.”

“I want them to be happy,” Claudia said, with the reluctance of someone uncomfortable with discussing the feelings of others. “I just want them both to be _them_.”

\--

The minute Myka had gone to bed that first night, Claudia took out the card she had received in the mail and researched the hell out of Lacuna, Inc., its origins and founder and location. “There’s no way this is a real thing,” she swore under her breath, typing furiously. “And if it is, they should _really_ update their security measures because, wow, that was easy.”

“Myka knows better than to do something so foolish,” Artie shouted, wearing a hole in Leena’s living room rug and perilously close to ranting, “How could she do something so dangerous, so stupid?”

“There haven’t been any pings linked to Lacuna, Inc. office locations,” Leena said, hesitating before adding, “It might not be an artifact.”

“This technology can’t exist,” Artie said vehemently, “No, this _smacks_ of an artifact, I can feel it.”

“Myka wouldn’t use an artifact.” Pete was sitting on the couch, his entire frame tense. He imagined the places in Myka’s mind that H.G. had once filled, now achingly hollow and cavernous, and hated H.G. even more.

“So we thought,” Artie huffed. “No, this--”

“No,” Pete said firmly. “This is Myka we’re talking about. She wouldn’t do anything that could have a downside.”

“There already _is_ a downside,” Artie said, “If I may remind you, I now have an agent who has no memory of one of the greatest threats this world has ever known, and we can’t even remind her of this fact, or the heroism she displayed in the face of that woman.”

At this, Artie sagged down into the couch. He no longer looked angry, just lost. “How could she be so rash?”

“It wasn’t rash.” Pete might not agree with it, but Myka was his partner. He had her back. “She knew what she was doing. It said so in her letter.”

“And she may have already been under the influence of an artifact then!” Artie pointed out, and Pete just kept shaking his head. They’d all read the letter she sent to him, and everyone had seen what he saw: Myka’s tight, embarrassed words, agonized and lonely.

“Yes, she might have,” agreed Mrs Frederic from the doorway to the living room. “The Regents are looking into this matter very carefully. If an artifact was not involved, then this calls Agent Bering’s status here as an agent into question.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, the room erupted with cries of scorching dissent.

Pete leapt to his feet. “If you fire Myka, I’m leaving too,” he warned, and Mrs Frederic held up a hand. Pete stopped, and behind him Artie, Leena and Claudia fell into silence.

“Agent Bering has always shown good judgment before,” Mrs Frederic stated, sounding for all the world like she agreed with what she was saying. “But this latest lapse was grievous.”

“But you can’t fire her for that,” Claudia said immediately, “You can’t.”

“Claudia,” Artie murmured gently.

Claudia shrugged off the hand Leena had put on her shoulder and ignored Artie’s tone. “Myka doesn’t remember anymore. You can’t even have her called in for questioning because she doesn’t remember. She can’t possibly defend a decision she doesn’t even know she made. Firing her for this would be just like firing someone for something they did under the influence of an artifact.” Claudia looked at Mrs Frederic pleadingly. “You don’t think she should be fired either, do you, Mrs F.?”

“You know that I am not the final word, Claudia,” Mrs Frederic said. “The Regents decide. I will give my opinion, if asked, but it is their decision.”

“But you agree with us,” Claudia said. “You’ll fight for Myka.”

Claudia sounded so close to heartbreak that Pete jumped in. “She did it for the Warehouse. Myka did all this because she didn’t feel she could be what she needed to be anymore. I don’t like it either, but she did it for us.”

“I assure you that the Regents will make their decision fully informed.” Mrs Frederic turned to Artie. “How is Agent Bering?”

He sighed heavily. “She’s… Myka. I think I could put her out in the field tomorrow.”

“You may wish to exercise more caution than that, Arthur,” she advised. “Are there any active pings?”

“Nothing pressing,” Artie said, making a move to go to the front hall and his doctor’s bag, “Though we could--”

But Mrs Frederic was gone.

“Typical,” Artie muttered.

\--

Myka leaned her head back against the wall of her cell and looked up, the better to keep her tears at bay. The jail was noisy, bangs and shouts ricocheting off the walls and bouncing through bars, and the chill that had been manageable a few hours earlier had settled deep into her bones.

Emily was gone.

And apparently, at some point, she had possibly been in love with someone else, who had been Emily before the accident -- or, more appropriately, before her personality was stored by the Regents -- and this person had given her life for the Warehouse.

For me, her mind repeated. The woman she had erased -- Helena, her name was Helena, sometimes called H.G. -- had given her life to protect her.

Helena hadn’t looked sad or afraid or worried. She had looked Myka in the eye and beamed, a smile like Emily’s but different. Emily’s smiles had been sweet and loving, and Helena’s…

Helena’s had been contented.

Myka didn’t know how to feel about that.

She wrapped her arms around herself and hoped that Artie could make the astrolabe work.

\--

 ****It was September when they started chasing down Wild Bill Hickok’s pistol, which had been causing a rash of what those affected thought was righteous violence. They found it in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the possession of Tom Everston, a P.E. teacher at Lincoln High School, who was about to use it on a student smoking pot behind the gym when Pete and Myka bagged it.

Once the pistol was neutralized, Myka told Everston how he had eaten a bad salad and would be fine, while Pete went over to gently scare the teen by flashing his badge. Everston, confused but pliable, had walked away muttering about never eating rabbit food again, and Myka felt pretty confident in the excellence of this particular snag.

“What were those sparks?” came a voice from across the faculty parking lot.

Myka had seen her face on the bulletin board in the office greeting new staff members, and the face and name had struck her. Emily Lake, she thought, as she scrambled for a reason and pulled out her badge.

\--

Agent Steve Jinks was brought in with his special talents and excellent credentials. It was a fairly happy coincidence that he was also the only person who could quell Claudia’s whirlwind, thus making him her perfect partner.

He knew something was up with Claudia and Pete the first time Myka brought her girlfriend Emily over, no extrasensory perception required. They were both acting manic, both totally excited and totally cool!!!! about Emily being there, and while Myka had looked back over her shoulder with her eyebrows raised in a _what the hell?_ expression, Steve had waited until Myka and Emily had gone out to the back porch before asking, “What is wrong with you?”

“Wrong?” Claudia said too quickly. “What, wrong, no! Nothing’s wrong! Everything’s copacetic up in here! Way psyched for Myka and Emily. As is Pete.”

“One hundred percent psyched.” Pete chimed in, craning his neck to see if he could catch a glimpse of the pair out back. “Totally on board.”

Steve crossed his arms. “It’s not even that you’re lying, it’s that your ‘one hundred percent psyched’ doesn’t account for the seventy-five percent weirded out, and you’re doing a poor job of hiding it.”

Claudia glanced at Pete.

“No,” he said warningly. “Nope. Claud, don’t.”

“He should know,” Claudia wheedled, and Pete started to back up, shaking his head and putting up his hands.

“No way. There is no reason for us to ever talk about it again.”

“Talk about what again?” Steve said.

Claudia ignored him. “He’s one of us now, and this is totally weird--”

“This is Myka’s thing--”

“It’s _not_ Myka’s thing, which is the whole point!”

“It is _completely_ Myka’s thing, and her choice, and if you will recall, we are _never to mention it again_ \--”

“To _Myka_ ,” Claudia hissed. “We can never tell _Myka_. No one said we couldn’t talk about it, and we clearly need to, because _she_ is _walking around our house now_ , and don’t you wish you could talk to Myka about it? Because Jinksy and I are besties, and I can’t vent properly about this _hugely weird thing_.”

“Nah, I’m good,” Steve said to no one. “No interest in knowing.”

Claudia spun to face him. “Emily is kind of H.G. Wells and Myka erased her from her memory and Emily doesn’t even know who she is.”

Steve blinked. “H.G. Wells is alive?”

\--

“It’s called retrograde amnesia,” Emily said, sounding sympathetic, as if Myka were the one she felt bad for, “I was in a car accident. I don’t remember anything further back than last July.”

“So I’m one of your first memories?” It was easy to flirt with Emily, who quirked her mouth over to the side. She found Myka adorable, and Myka hadn’t realized how much she missed that.

“You’re focusing on the wrong thing here,” Emily chided. “I have no memory of my childhood, or going to college, or anything beyond being told that I had been in a bad accident.”

Myka was sitting in Emily’s kitchen, and she reached her fingers out to grasp at Emily’s hips. She came willingly, with a smile, and Myka’s heart was full to bursting. “Are you okay? Other than that, I mean.”

“Other than the marbles rattling around in my empty head, you mean?” Emily laughed and put her hands on Myka’s shoulders. “Yes. Other than that, I’m fine.”

The thought occurred to her as she fingered the texture of Emily’s skirt, the nubby wool dark green. She swallowed hard. “Emily, if you… if you think this is going too fast, or you’d rather--”

“Myka, no.” Emily’s voice was clear and sharp, but the hands she had brought up to Myka’s face were gentle. “That wasn’t at all what I meant. I wanted you to know. Going forward.”

Myka remembered this feeling, the dizzy headlong rush into a love you were sure of, with the open smiles and clasped hands that it brought. The sensation was familiar, despite having it felt it last with Sam so many years ago.

As she beamed up at Emily, there was only a flicker of guilt that she didn’t know about the Warehouse.

\--

“Ms Bering,” said the older man who promised such a blessed nepenthe, who looked so kindly in his lab coat, “I don’t mean to influence you one way or the other, as this is a personal and profound decision to make, but might I suggest that you at least consider the potential ramifications of a psyche forever... spinning its wheels, as it were.”

He had been talking to her for the better part of an hour, explaining the procedure and how it worked. Specific, controlled brain damage. A precision strike against the plaguing presence. She had stripped her room at the B&B bare of everything that reminded her of Helena, and that which remained in the Warehouse would belong to H.G. Wells, the science fiction author and genius.

She could be good at this. She could excel at purging Helena from her mind, removing all traces of her face and voice and actions, and she could remove the doubt. She could still be a loyal agent to the Warehouse, uncompromised by the memory of a gun barrel searing against her forehead and the black of Helena’s eyes.

“I can handle that,” Myka had replied steadily. “Where do I sign?”

 ****\--

“I think she’s my One,” Myka told Pete by the glow of the dashboard as they drove back from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It was late and they’d finally found a radio station that played decent music, and they were going past the closest town to Univille that had a high school, and therefore the town where Emily Lake was considering teaching next fall.

There was a part of Pete that wanted to lighten the mood by kidding with Myka, but the greater part understood this for what it was. He had felt that way about a girl before, that fragile, desperate bubble in your chest, and he couldn’t diminish this for Myka, who was still his best friend.

“You think?” he said, leadingly, “Or you know?”

Myka sucked in a breath, long and deep, but Pete waited her out. “I know. I think I know. I-- I know it seems kind of weird, because she still hasn’t regained her memories, but I can’t wait for that. It might never happen.” The logic circled back on her, and she rubbed her thumb nail along her pointer. “And if it does, and she… feels differently, at least I’d have her now, right? It’s not like we have the safest job in the world anyway. We could be dead tomorrow.”

 Pete glanced over at her to see her staring back at him. “Mykes,” he started, the set of her jaw, waiting for a coming blow, hurt because he would never let her do this on her own. “Is this the kind of announcement that comes with hugs? Because I can pull over if that’s the case.”

“Shut up,” she answered, but her smile lit her face, and she didn’t even protest when he started singing along with Livin’ On a Prayer, complete with guitar noises.

\--

“Mykes! You should have seen that kid’s face--” his words were halted when he saw Myka talking to H.G. Wells, who was casually standing there on the other side of a chain-link fence in slacks and a cardigan.

Why hadn’t he been vibing out, he wanted to know as he jogged the rest of the way there, his hand on his Tesla. It didn’t look like H.G. had a weapon on her, but she was carrying a big bag. Who knew what she had in there.

“Pete, this is Ms Lake,” Myka answered, turning her head slightly towards him, but leaving her eyes on H.G., “She knows Coach Everston.”

“I do,” chirped H.G. in an American accent, “And Agent Bering here was trying to explain what the Secret Service is doing in Cheyenne.”

They were _flirting_.

They were flirting, and H.G. hadn’t once looked at Pete like she even knew him, let alone that she felt smug and superior and probably murderous. She was just standing there in her coral cardigan, making eyes at Myka, and it wasn’t like he ever seriously doubted that Myka had game, but this was impressive. Or, it would be, if it wasn’t H.G. Wells.

“I-- I have-- phone,” Pete babbled, motioning to his pocket, and H.G.-- Ms Lake?-- glanced at him before flicking her eyes back to Myka, who was staring at him like he was raised in a barn, but he walked away and took out his Farnsworth.

“If it’s still causing problems you may need his hat,” Artie said when he answered, but Pete was shaking his head. “What. ‘No’? Pete, use words.”

“H.G.,” he grit out through clenched teeth, as though there was a chance she could hear him standing over by the fence, flirting with Myka. “H.G. is here but she doesn’t sound like her and she’s acting like she doesn’t know Myka and I’m not even getting a vibe.”

“Let me see,” Artie demanded, and Pete furtively held his Farnsworth up over his shoulder.

Artie held a magnifying glass up to his screen. “What, exactly, has she said to you?”

“Nothing. No, um, she said something flirty about Myka after Myka said something flirty about her because they’re flirting, _I think they’re flirting_.”

“Is it really H.G.?” Claudia asked, her head popping into the frame, “Let me see!”

Pete obligingly held his Farnsworth up again.

 **"** What do we do?” Claudia asked, and Pete motioned emphatically at the screen.

“Yes, that, what do we do?”

“For the moment we do nothing.” Mrs Frederic’s entrances were always a surprise, but less so for Pete than for Artie and Claudia, who had their hands to their chests to still their racing hearts.

Mrs Frederic stepped in front of Artie’s Farnsworth. On either side of her, Claudia and Artie peered in. “Agent Lattimer, the Regents are, in fact, aware of the situation.”

“So what do I do?”

“We ask that your monitor the situation and keep us apprised of any goings on.”

The goings on included dinner in the name of recon at a nearby chain restaurant that Myka would have never agreed to had he suggested it and certainly nothing the H.G. he knew would have liked, but Emily sheepishly admitted to it being the nearest edible food. Emily had just started at Lincoln, vaguely skirting around what she did before in a guileless way that Pete found unsettling because it _wasn’t_ unsettling. Myka sparkled quietly as she ate her club sandwich, her eyes on Emily. Pete almost regretted the immediate wilco he had given Mrs Frederic, because it seemed almost indecent to report back on this, until Emily turned to ask the waiter for another iced tea and he saw H.G.’s profile and recalled, in stunning clarity, what had led them all here.

\--

Pete knew so much about the procedure he could probably talk someone through it. With Claudia’s help, he had followed Lacuna back to the studies and journals and grants from the initial stages of the operation, combing out all the minute details of how they map the patient’s brain by making the patient react to something related to the person they wanted to erase, how they came into your room during the night and erased the person so thoroughly that you woke up with a new life. The only thing missing, Claudia pointed out, were testimonials, but that’s because the happy customers have no memory of the procedure.

He could imagine Myka finding the facility in Minneapolis, checking their safety rating and googling the doctor in charge of the procedure in this Lacuna, Inc. office. He could imagine her sitting in the office, filling out forms with that stoic expression of hers, each letter sloping just so. He could imagine her debating what name to put under who was to be erased, vacillating between H.G. or Helena or Helena G., as though she could be mistaken for another Helena Wells in their lives. He liked to think that she hesitated before signing her name on the release forms, but he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that once she had stepped into that office that all debate had been quelled. Myka Bering was nothing if not deliberate in her actions.

He could also picture her trying not to cry, but he tried not to dwell on it.

\--

There was a gun pointed at her and a collar holding her against a chair beneath a blade, and Myka could not remember ever being so terrified.

And, by the looks of it, neither could H.G. Wells, whose eyes were full of tears and achingly pained. “I’m sorry, Myka,” she said, her tone heartrending as her arms trembled with the effort to drop the gun. She had never checkmated the man who had designed this lock, and Myka was going to die because this brilliant mind -- the mind who had brought forth works Myka had once pored over, enchanted and enthralled -- was too frightened to think straight. Too full of nerves and love.

She looked just like Emily, and nothing like Emily.

“Helena,” Myka said, trying out her real first name, “listen to me.” A tear slid down her face involuntarily, but she kept her voice steady. She had known this woman before, and Helena still knew her. “I am not going to die here, okay? Because you are going to take a breath, and you’re going to save my life.”

Helena inhaled and briefly closed her eyes before her lips curled upwards. Her eyes glowed when she opened them, locked on Myka’s. “Change the rules,” she said.

Myka did not like the sound of that. Following the rules may not have saved anyone, but surely cheating wasn’t the answer.

“Change the rules,” Helena repeated, her eyes alight with confidence, and Myka placed her life in Helena’s hands.

\--

Emily was not H.G., and a piece of Claudia resented her for it

H.G. had tinkered on gadgets with her, shown her antique wiring and marveled at modern ones, had fixed glitches with nothing more than a passing knowledge of modern cell phones and, amazingly, did this all while thinking _Claudia_ was a genius.

 **E** mily was lovely. She had cute, professional outfits and smelled like violets and always smiled sweetly at Claudia. Above all, she made Myka all glowy, even when all they were doing was sitting together while Emily graded and Myka read. Emily had the same glow in her eyes, too.

But it was all too easy to remember that Myka had voluntarily erased some of her memory, and that H.G. was being held somewhere, somehow, while Emily was here in South Dakota with them. Sometimes the thought of it pounded so hard in Claudia’s brain that she worried that she wouldn’t realize she had spoken the words until it was too late.  She looked at them and saw the tortuous route that these two didn’t even know that they had taken to one another, each choice they had made had damned them to this, the same shapes in a different pattern, a twist away from what might have been. It was almost too much to bear.

So Claudia kept her distance from Emily, polite but busy, and did her best to ignore Myka’s wounded eyes and Emily’s confusion. Nothing good could come of her getting too close.

\--

 **"** What do you think of Ms Lake?” Mrs Frederic’s voice came from the empty dark of the hallway outside of Pete’s bedroom, and he nearly fell off his bed.

“Jeez,” he exclaimed, just barely keeping himself from cursing. “Hi, Mrs Frederic, good to see you, too.”

She looked at him at him placidly.

He got up and motioned her in, closing his door behind her. When he turned around, Mrs Frederic was looking around his room appraisingly, and Pete winced at the dirty socks on the floor.

“What do I think about Emily?” He asked, smoothly kicking the offending socks under the bed, “She’s okay.”

“Be specific, Agent Lattimer.”

Myka was in Cheyenne with Emily, because that’s what they did now that they were a them, Myka drove down or Emily drove up, and they’re moving too fast but are they, and it’s weird but it’s not.

“Uh, well, she’s pretty quiet around us. I think she’s chattier with Myka. And she must be pretty smart if Myka likes her, but I don’t think she’s as crazy smart as H.G.. But a few times she’s been… kind of snarky? It was… different.”

It had been funny, actually, because it was so like H.G. but in a good way, and Myka had found it hilarious, and for a few moments everything had seemed normal.

Mrs Frederic considered his words for a long time, until Pete couldn’t take the silence anymore, and he burst out with a question that had been plaguing him since Mrs Frederic had explained how Emily Lake had come to be. “H.G.-- real H.G.-- isn’t suffering, is she? I get that she probably needs mondo amounts of therapy but she’s not being waterboarded or anything, right?”

He still hated H.G. for what had happened with Myka and Kelly and Egypt and the Warehouse and the world, but it was hard to hate her and be nice to Emily, and he needed to be nice to Emily because Myka was seriously into her, and even if he did hate her, he didn’t want her to be suffering.

“No, Agent Lattimer. I can’t imagine that she is.”

The answer did nothing to allay his discomfort.

\--

Emily had been told -- mostly by her new colleagues, but others as well -- that she was too empathetic. She didn’t think it was possible to be too empathetic to her student whose father was in jail, or another whose mother had died, or still another who had been struggling for years with various health ailments. She didn’t coddle but she was sensitive, and she was willing to listen.

She liked to listen to others’ stories because she had none of her own, and the emptiness of her mind was dark and lonely. She used to have pictures up on her wall, of people she had once known, but they were all gone now, and she didn’t know them. She replaced their pictures with artwork and filled her life with her students, the brilliant and the awkward, the struggling and the charmed. They left windows to their souls everywhere, these teenagers, in their answers during class, in their essays, when they hung back after class and asked Ms Lake if she really thought that they could achieve whatever goal she had mentioned, and she loved them for it.

Myka took longer to share, but when she did, her words had soaked into Emily’s skin and crawled along her bones, lodging between her heart and throat. Myka was short and factual when it came to recounting things, but it was all the heartache left unspoken that Emily heard. She knew Myka well enough to read between the lines, and could taste the salt of the tears Myka had shed for Sam and the bitterness of her father’s rejection. Myka would speak haltingly, and Emily would thread her fingers through her hair and wonder if she had once had heartache of her own like this, and if she would someday, again. One morning she had guided Myka’s fingers to the fine, pale lines on her stomach and whispered her theory that she may have, at some point, had a child, but there had been no evidence of any beyond Dickens when she had first entered her apartment. Myka had nuzzled Emily’s temple, pressing a kiss there as she waited for an outpouring, but none came. Emily’s mind was empty and waiting for be filled.

\--

Outside the Valu-Mart in Elk Ridge, Claudia grabbed Pete’s arm as Myka stalked ahead, armed with their list of items. “How are we doing this?” she asked.

Pete shrugged. “I guess we’ll figure out once we actually get the Janus Coin, right?”

“No, we need a plan that relates to H.G. finding out that Myka erased her.”

“Oh boy,” Pete said, making a face. “That’s gonna be unpleasant.”

“It is,” Claudia agreed, narrowing her eyes. “Why do I feel like--”

“Claud,” Pete interrupted, clapping a hand on her back, “I have no doubt that you’re just the person for this.”

“Oh, come on, this is going to suck,” she sulked as they walked through the automatic doors, “Can’t we flip a coin?... Bad choice of words.”

“No way. You two are science bros.” Claudia couldn’t really argue that point and sighed. Seeing his victory, Pete continued, “There’s no way she’d rather hear it from me.”

“I see your point but I do not like it,” she grumbled.

And she did not like it any more when the Regent associate opened the safe and brought out a small black ball, handing it to Claudia.

“Hey, Mykes, let’s clear the room,” Pete said as Claudia cradled the ball to her chest, and coughed subtly.

Myka, who had been holding herself ramrod straight, looked as though she wanted to protest. She was still processing the fact that she had willingly erased a huge swath of her memory, and why, and she was angry but trying not to be, which Pete both recognized and respected.

“I want to know what she’s going to say,” Myka bit out, her arms crossed tightly as they stepped back out into the dairy section of Valu-Mart.

“I know,” Pete agreed, “but I think H.G. is going to want a minute to process this alone. Or, I guess, alone with someone--”

“-- Who didn’t voluntarily erase her.” Myka finished bitterly.

“Wasn’t gonna say that. I was going to say someone who--”

“There’s no good way to end this sentence, Pete, just let it go.”

He couldn’t tell who Myka was angrier at, H.G. or herself, and it wasn’t clarified when Claudia called them back and H.G. looked composed if decimated. Myka could hardly stand to look at her, and H.G.’s watery “Hello, Myka,” was barely acknowledged.

Grief, Pete reminded himself, because Myka had lost Emily no matter what happened with H.G. and the regents. Myka was grieving, and H.G. stood there looking real as anything while her body was somewhere wearing Emily Lake’s clothes and in the presence of a mad man.

H.G. reached her hand up to hold on to her locket, her eyes lingering on Myka before jumping to Claudia. “I’m afraid I have no idea what this Sykes could want with me,” she said, and the war they were facing became all the realer to Pete.

\--

Steve was fired and Claudia was livid. She barely managed a terse greeting when Emily showed up on a Friday afternoon, a basket of scones in her hands.

Claudia narrowed her eyes at her. “This is a bribe, isn’t it? You’re trying to bribe me with baked goods.”

“Bribe you to do what?” Emily said innocently, pulling back the napkin’s edge so that the scent of scones wafted out tantalizingly.  “I just thought I should contribute. You’ve hosted me for dinner often enough. They’re cranberry.”

Claudia narrowed her eyes. If her weakness for cranberries was being exploited, it was only at the hands of masterminds. “Who put you up to this? Myka?”

Emily lifted the hand not occupied with scones to show her innocence. “I’m here as a friend, for a chat over cranberry scones and coffee. The others are still at work, right? There’s no sense at letting these poor scones go stale with no one to try them.”

It was clever to send Emily Lake, high school teacher extraordinaire, to talk with her, Claudia thought as she followed Emily into the dining room. As far as Myka knew, Emily was a logical choice given her experience with adolescents. And before, Claudia would have accused Myka of being devious, but now it’s not like she could point out how well she and H.G. had gotten along until Yellowstone.

“I don’t need to be coddled,” Claudia said, throwing herself into a dining room chair and helping herself to a scone. It was warm from the sun and sprinkled with sugar and heavenly.

“I agree,” Emily said, daintily tearing her scone in half.

Claudia consumed her scone and waited for Emily to say something, but nothing came.

“Steve is a great agent,” she said bitterly, “He’s awesome.”

“I have heard that,” Emily replied, but she didn’t sound like she was humoring Claudia, or indulging her. She sounded like she was engaging in a conversation. “And fun to be around.”

“The _most_ fun,” Claudia said emphatically, grabbing another scone.

“The _most_ fun,” Emily echoed. “It won’t be the same here without him.”

Claudia scoffed. “Of course not. How could it be? He’s my person and--” Realizing she couldn't adequately explain Steve's role as an agent, and the balance he brought to the Warehouse team-- something Claudia would have been able to talk about with H.G.-- she just looked up at Emily. It wasn't fair to expect Emily to understand things, or react, the way H.G. would, but she still assumed she'd see only affected sympathy in Emily's eyes Instead they were just warm.

“I may not know much, due to my head injury and all,” Emily paused dramatically, and Claudia smiled in spite of herself before firmly chalking it down as a smirk, “But I know what it’s like to have someone be your person. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have them go away, under any circumstances.”

“Yeah, well,” Claudia said to stop herself from blurting something inappropriate like _you were Myka’s person and then she erased you_ , “Keep making these scones and we’ll see if we can keep you around.”

\--

A tiny pile of nanites lay dead in Jane Lattimer’s hand, victims of a fierce eradication effort, and they knew that _someone_ had breached Warehouse security, but not who, and what they were after: a file called only Atlas-66.

“Atlas-66,” Pete mused. “A map would be too easy.”

“No, sir,” Jane interrupted before he could get any farther, sounding for all the world like an elementary school teacher, “We are not playing a guessing game. The Regents have a plan in place--”

“ _Atlas Shrugged_ ,” Claudia suggested, undeterred, “Something with Ayn Rand?”

“Doubtful,” Artie snorted, before catching Jane’s look and saying, “But we’re not going to guess, as we’re going to listen to Jane and let. It. Go.”

Their speculation lay dormant until Jane left the room to report the status of the Warehouse invaders. The door had scarcely shut behind her when Myka said, “H.G. Wells.”

Everyone froze.

“You know, the author? I looked him up, and I read his books, which were amazing, but H.G. Wells was born in Atlas House in 1866.”

“Oh, god,” Artie got out seconds before Pete and Claudia exclaimed, “Emily!”

Artie turned towards his computer and barked, “Claudia, we need camera footage, anything around her house and on her way to school.”

“On it,” Claudia was already scrambling towards her computer, her fingers flying across the keys.

“Pete, Myka, go--”

“We’re gone,” Pete answered, tugging at Myka’s arm, who was looking at the sudden chaos with great suspicion.

“What is going on?” she asked, swinging her arm away from Pete’s grasping hand, “What does any of this have to do with Emily?”

“There is no time,” Artie shot over his shoulder, “Pete will explain in the car. You need to move.”

Pete had always felt that, if the time came that Myka needed to be told about her decision, it would fall to him. After all, he was Myka’s partner, and as such it was his responsibility. Even so, as he hustled Myka out the door, he had a sinking feeling that things wouldn’t be the same after.

 ****\--

If there’s one thing Pete could say about H.G. Wells -- and would, for the rest of his life -- it’s that she always rose to the occasion when it came to Myka.

A calm had settled after they had told H.G. what Myka had done, and who Emily Lake was, and it barely faltered. She was a good soldier.

She would have let Emily live. She said as much in the clearing, as evenly as though she were discussing the weather, how it only made sense for the Janus coin to be destroyed. “Apparently there’s a better me,” she had said, her eyes flicking over to Myka as she tried for levity, but there was something brittle in her tone that made every ounce of hatred Pete had nursed and cherished disappear.

She was no longer H.G. Wells, supervillain who had ruined everything, but only Helena, displaced and repentant and forgotten and, by the look of it, broken down.

Pete had watched as Helena had quietly said her goodbyes to Claudia, who might have been the only person left on the planet who loved _her_ \-- not the author the world knew or Emily Lake. Myka watched the exchange with wide, unblinking eyes, still stunned by the revelation of Emily’s genesis, and couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with her hands with Helena turned to her.

“Myka,” Helena had started, her voice unusually heavy with emotion. “I--” She stopped herself and smiled, heartbreaking and brilliant. “I wish you the best.”

Myka had kept her arms wrapped tightly around her torso. “I don’t want this,” she said thickly. “I can’t--”

“Myka,” Helena said, and off to the side Claudia looked like she was holding back sobs through sheer force of will, “The Warehouse must be protected.” Her voice was sweet and soft. “If the coin is destroyed, whatever this man wants will be lost. So,” She took a deep breath that shook. “You must be brave.”

And she had looked up at the sky and put herself in their hands to be destroyed for the good of the Warehouse, and Pete was sure that Myka and Claudia would ever look at him the same way again.

\--

“There’s something down here,” Myka said, crouched on a dirt floor below a restaurant in Tai Po. She held up a necklace, the metal gleaming in what little light there was.

“That could belong to anyone,” Pete said sensibly, looking around the space for a more concrete clue. Lots of people wore necklaces.

“Maybe,” Myka said absently, opening the square pendant. “There’s a picture of a little girl.”

Pete’s hair stood on end. “An old-timey little girl?”

“Mm,” Myka said, tilting her head, “In black and white.” She looked up at him suspiciously. “Why?”’

He moved over to her and Myka stood up, showing him the locket’s contents without relinquishing it. “Atta girl, H.G.,” he breathed.

“Who is it?” Myka asked sharply. Her lack of insight was making her irritable.

Pete had never seen H.G.’s locket up close, but he had seen the shape of it, and the face in the photo was easily identified. “That’s H.G.’s little girl, Christina. This is our clue. Come on, there has to be another way out of here, look around.”

But Myka was frozen, her eyes glued to Christina’s sweet face. “There was a baby,” she said softly. “Emily wondered.”

There wasn’t time for this sentiment, Pete knew, but he couldn’t yank Myka through this. It was a lot to take in.

“Look, Mykes,” he said awkwardly, keenly aware of the time they were wasting, “What the Regents did to H.G. -- and Emily, and you -- was really messed up.”

Myka huffed out a cold laugh. “Yeah. That’s one way to put it.” She wrapped her fingers around the locket and shoved it into her pocket, sniffed once, and then motioned to the floor. “It looks like something moved here. See the drag marks?”

\--

With less than a minute left on a bomb, Helena brilliance shone as brightly as the barrier she rerouted. “It was the only way I could think to save you,” she said, glowing with pleasure, and Pete thought that maybe this vibrant purpose was part of the Helena Myka had always seen.

Myka said, “But you’re out there.” Her voice was quiet with confusion, as though she was waiting for more information. There had to be more.

“It had to be initiated from outside the barrier,” Helena explained.  

“No,” Pete had started, “You have to let us help you,” and Artie spoke over him, telling Helena that it didn’t have to be this way, but Helena only had eyes for Myka, bright and shining.

“Pete, you’ll tell her some nice things, won’t you?”

“Yeah,” Pete answered immediately, “I will--” but Helena wasn’t listening to him anymore. She was smiling tenderly at Myka and looked completely at home.

She whispered, “I smell apples,” her voice awash in wonder, and then there was only light.

\--

When they disarmed Sykes’s bomb, there was too much nervous energy and not enough ways to express it. Pete tried to relieve it by pumping the air and exclaiming vaguely self-congratulatory statements, gathering Myka up in an exuberant hug, and hugging Helena in a quieter one. Artie, jittery, had demanded they all return to the B&B to ensure everything was okay back there, but Myka could see the way his nerves jangled with excitement.

“May I join you?” Helena asked hours later, her voice purposefully light.

“Yeah,” Myka said quickly, sitting up from the way she had slouched over the dining room table. No one else had felt compelled to write a report on what had happened, and though Artie had insisted he would do it, it was soothing to Myka. She could better distance herself from the stress of it by writing it down. “Yes, please. Come sit.” She clicked her pen and laid it down, so as not to fidget, and watched as Helena sat, lithe and lovely. Despite the fact that Helena and Emily were the same figure, there was nothing of Emily in Helena’s movements.

“I wanted to thank you,” Helena began brightly, “For your help with the Mary Celeste rigging.”

“I didn’t really help,” Myka said, flushing. “At all. My first instinct was to touch it, like I was Pete or something.” Seeing Helena ensnared, coupled with the rasp of her strangled voice, had shaken Myka so badly that her only thought had been to _act_ , as though she were a frightened civilian and not a trained Warehouse agent. She _had_ read the manual. She knew better than that. They might have both died if Artie hadn’t found them so quickly.

“All’s well that ends well,” Helena said with a shrug, but her eyes watched Myka’s every move. “I also wanted to… express my condolences.”

Myka knew the answer before she asked. “For what?”

“Your Emily,” Helena said, her tone sincere. “It’s my fault that she’s gone, and I wanted to tell you…” Helena stopped and pulled her hair back with both hands. It was frustration, and the sight of it made something in Myka’s chest twinge painfully. “I wanted to tell you that if I could give her back to you, I would.”

“Don’t say that,” Myka replied immediately, looking down at her report and picking up her pen. She desperately started where she had left off, _Agent Nielsen then neutralized_... when Helena’s hand came down on her wrist. Myka looked up, startled.

“Why not?” Helena asked, the lightness gone. Everything about Helena was dark and pained.

“I know what you did,” Myka said quietly. “But that punishment was inhumane. It was cruel, and I could never ask--”

“But you should,” Helena insisted. “That, and more. You _trusted_ me, Myka.”

“That’s enough,” Myka said. “I told you in the sanctum that I wasn’t interested in your guilt.”

It came out harsher than she intended, and Helena immediately stiffened. “You’re right. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

She was nearly to the doors into the living room before Myka had stood up. “Helena, _stop_.”

Helena did, one hand on the door frame, and looked back.

“I don’t-- I don’t know what I’m doing,” Myka said. “You remember these things that, up until yesterday, I didn’t know had happened. Up until yesterday, I thought that Emily Lake was a teacher who had been in a car accident. I’m missing so much and I _hate_ it, and it’s all because I made a drastic decision.”

“You were in pain,” Helena said softly. “Pain of which I was the cause.”

“That seems to be the likely reason,” Myka agreed.

She took a breath before continuing, “I ran across the H.G. Wells aisle a few months ago and I was stymied. How could there be someone who had written classic novels that I had never read? So I got them all and read them.”

“Enjoying my work is hardly a reason--”

Myka moved around to face Helena, “You’re right, but it’s not just the books, or the things you created. The Helena I do remember, the one who’s here right now? I don’t want her to be punished that way.”

“Even if it meant the return of Emily Lake?”

“Emily wouldn’t want her existence to be based on the suffering of another,” Myka said honestly, “And neither would I. Besides…”

Myka paused for a long moment, and when Helena caught her eye, Myka shrugged sadly, the side of her mouth quirking upwards. “Besides, I always felt Emily would get her memory back. I just didn’t expect it to include memories of me.”

“Maybe someday I could catch you up,” Helena said softly. Her eyes had the faintest glimmer of hope, and Myka wondered if her eyes did too. She could tell she was smiling much too hard after a day like today.

“I’d like that,” she answered, and Helena held a gaze for a long moment before looking down with a cough.

 **"** It’s been a long day. Claudia, the darling girl, has offered to let me stay in her room.”

There was something in the way Helena mentioned Claudia, her voice filled with affection, that reminded Myka of what lay tucked in her pocket. “Helena!” she exclaimed, too loudly.

The way Helena turned, saying “Myka?” in question with the same sweetness as she had referred to Claudia, made Myka’s stomach clench. She pulled the locket out of her pocket and thrust it forward.

“Here. I found it. It was a really good clue, but I know it must mean a lot to you--”

But Helena was breathing a name like a prayer, her eyes soft and wet when she finally tore them away from the locket she’d opened. “You found it.”

Myka nodded. “It was really brave. I figured it had to be a clue, but Pete knew right away it was your little girl. And...and you need to know. _I’d_ want to know.”

“Know what?” Helena pulled the necklace over her head, her hand clutching it as if to draw comfort.

“Emily wondered. She wondered if she had had a baby. And I…” Myka stopped. She wanted to say that she wished that she remembered something of Helena, despite the impossibility of it. She wanted to have something that dear to her heart, but it seemed selfish to say to Helena, who looked at her with such eyes.

Instead, Myka said something else just as true. “I wanted you know that you didn’t forget her, even though you couldn’t remember.”

“You have no idea what that means to me,” Helena said, reaching her free hand out to clasp Myka’s. “Thank you.”

“How did you know?” The words came out before Myka had a chance to edit them, her hand still caught in Helena’s. “That someone would find it, I mean.”

Helena lifted her eyes to Myka’s and held her gaze. “I knew _you_ would,” she said after a moment, “because I know you.”

 

 


End file.
